What is the Carbon Impact of a day of Downhill Skiing?

I have been an infrequent alpine skier lately – I just enjoy the free and quiet pleasures of backcountry skiing more than the crowds, liftlines, competitiveness and overall artifice of the downhill ski scene. But here we are just a few miles from one of New York’s premier ski resorts – Gore Mountain – and it has been years since Robin and I enjoyed a day of downhill together – so we jumped in the Prius early one day this week, had breakfast at Cafe Sara in town and made the gondola by nine thirty am after being fitted with ridiculously short rental skis.
So what is the carbon footprint of a day of alipine skiing? Some studies determined that for most skiers, the actual skiing part (lifts and snowmaking) is only about 2% of a skiing holiday. Just getting to the resort is 73% of the typical skiers carbon footprint.
But since we were already here, I needed to figure out the impacts of just the skiing part of downhill skiing, basically the lifts and snowmaking. The best estimate I have been able to find is an Aspen ski resort study, which comes up with about 0.02 tons of Co2 equivalent per skier day. So 50 days of skiing would be one ton of CO2 – about the same as flying round trip cross country.
 

 So my one day of skiing, based on the Aspen numbers, would be about 40 pounds of CO2, or about the same as using two gallons of gasoline. That’s what it takes, per person, for two people driving up here from the NY metro area in a 50 mpg Prius.
EXCEPT – lucky for me and my carbon footprint, Gore Mountain recently built a solar farm a few miles south of here in Washington County, and claims that 85% of its annual electrical demand (I.e., lifts and snowmaking) is now sourced from renewable energy. Doubtless some trading is going on to get to that 85%, but I am ok with trading KWh for KWh. Kudos to New York State, which runs Gore, for investing in an energy future that just might include a climate for downhill skiing! So I figure my carbon footprint for a day of skiing, conservatively, at 30% of the 40 pound Aspen number, or about 12 pounds. Gotta leave something for the diesel in the groomers, which are most assuredly not electric. Yet.